The civil rights complaint filed last week against the city’s Department of Education by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund creates an opportunity for long overdue changes in how students are admitted to New York’s best public high schools.

A federal judge in Manhattan declared on Thursday that the rules against loitering in public housing complexes were unconstitutionally vague, and gave the police too much discretion about whom to arrest.

The ruling by Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of Federal District Court in Manhattan allowed a lawsuit challenging police arrests for trespassing in housing projects to move closer to trial.

Even more so today than when the Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s race-conscious admissions policy nine years ago in Grutter v. Bollinger, there is broad consensus that a diverse college experience better prepares students to participate in our nation’s civic life and our rapidly globalizing economy. This consensus is reflected by the wide spectrum of amicus filings suppodrting the University of Texas’s admissions program in Fisher v.

The Sweatt family’s brief in the pending Supreme Court case, Fisher v. University of Texas, which the justices will hear next Wednesday, makes much of Chief Justice Vinson’s reference to “the interplay of ideas and the exchange of views.” It was, the brief maintains, “this court’s first recognition of the importance of diversity in higher education.”